Works with Google Meet
Listen records Google Meet calls from your Mac and transcribes them there. Nothing joins the call, and no Google account is connected to anything.
This looks like an Intel Mac, and Listen will not run on it.
Listen transcribes on your own machine, and that needs the Neural Engine Apple introduced with the M1 in late 2020. There is no Intel version, and there is no version that would work.
Open the Apple menu and choose About This Mac. If it says Chip rather than Processor, this guess is wrong and you can download Listen as normal.
How it works
The menu bar is still there for a call it did not catch, or one you want running before anybody has joined. Either way your microphone goes to one track and everything Google Meet plays goes to another, which is what lets Listen tell the voices apart afterwards.
Why this one is different
The usual way to take notes in a Google Meet call is to let a bot join it, where it sits in the participant list with a name on it for the whole meeting. Listen records the audio your Mac is already playing instead, so the call has exactly the people in it that you invited.
Google Meet runs in a browser tab, which most notetakers treat as a problem to be solved with an extension, a bot, or access to your Google account. Listen records the sound the tab is making. There is nothing to connect and nothing to grant.
After the call
Give the call your attention, not your notepad. Listen writes it up on your Mac's own chip, works out who spoke, and remembers the voices, so the regulars name themselves after the first time.
Privacy
There is no Listen server, because there are no servers. The recording, the transcript and the names on it are all made on your own computer. No account, and nothing reports back beyond anonymous usage statistics, on by default and turned off in Settings whenever you like.
Listen ships a machine-readable list of every connection it is allowed to make, inside the app itself, so none of that has to be taken on trust. What runs where sets out every connection it can make and how to check each one yourself, and there are answers ready for a privacy or HIPAA review.
Questions
Yes. Listen records the audio your browser is playing along with your microphone, so a Meet call needs no extension and no bot.
No. Listen never connects to Google. If you want recordings named after the meeting they match, it reads the calendar macOS already has, which needs no sign-in of its own.
Yes. Nothing about the meeting has to permit it, because nothing about the meeting is involved.
Meet announces its own recording. It cannot see this one. Tell them yourself.
Yes. Everyone on the far side is on one track for the whole call, and Listen separates the voices on it however many there are.
Get Listen
Free to download, and free to record for as long as you like. Apple silicon, macOS 14 or later. The speech model is about 2.5 GB and downloads once, the first time you run it.
Also works with
Listen is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Google Meet or its owner. Google Meet is named here only to describe what Listen records.
